Phishing Emails Targeting Patrons of Butterfield Bank

Royalgazette.com reported on 7th April, 2015 stating that a new "phishing" electronic mail directed at customers of Butterfield Group, a bank with headquarters in Hamilton, Bermuda, has been spotted in an attempt to infringe their user details.

The fake email begins with the heading "Important notification" and tells the customer that the Bank regrets to inform him that the bank for security reasons has blocked or locked his account. The reason cited is standard security renewal. The recipient is told to immediately reply so as to restore complete functionality of his account by updating his profile with the bank.

Consequently, a link has to be clicked by the customers embedded within the email.

The email ends with the motto of Butterfield Bank: "Inspired. Motivated. Involved".

Royalgazette.com published a report on 7th April, 2015 quoting a Spokesman of Butterfield Group as saying "Unfortunately, fake emails claiming to be from Butterfield or other local financial enterprises are recurrently sent to accounts of Bermuda. We shall never mail you a reminder via email asking your personal details, online username and passwords or will never direct you to a website asking you to update or unlock your net account."

The Bank explains the modus-operandi of such scams on its official website: Fraudsters generally scan the Internet for email addresses or generate them at random as they don't need mailing lists of online service provider .They may send few dozens of emails and sometimes thousand emails and even if only few innocent recipients respond, it can be worth doing. These frauds can look genuine because they use names of real people, the correct branding (as in the above case) and logos, links to pages of real website and the a site which imitates the real thing. They add that technically it is quite easy to copy and paste genuine pages to a new fake address.

Meanwhile, the success of each fraudulent email completely depends on how to trick the recipient. However, you can easily find signs of warning such as fake emails often have a false sense of urgency to follow their instructions (like in the above case), or address you in a generic manner.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/16/2015